Inspiration - 11.27.2023

When I talk about "inspiration," I think the biggest thing isn't so much finding things to write about--my brain is always full of ideas--but rather the inspiration to get on the computer and type them out, or even bigger, get on the computer and proofread again. For that I usually get inspired by other creative people around me promoting their work. Perhaps the one that has inspired me the most was author Stewart O'Nan's appearance on Anthony Bourdain's Pittsburgh episode of Parts Unknown. I hadn't heard of him before, so it wasn't his actual writing that inspired me, but rather when Bourdain introduced him to us as having written 15 novels (and it's more than that since the episode aired). At that point I hadn't even published my first novel, Chad in Accounting, let alone 15, but just that number, 15, and my desire to have a number of novels published like that, got me back on the computer to proofread Chad in Accounting again, and also to start writing A Girl and a Gun; and I haven't looked back since, continuing this cadence of writing one new rough draft a year, and then in 2020 when I finally did publish Chad in Accounting, publishing a new book every year as well, with A Girl and a Gun in 2021, Holtman Arms in 2022, and most recently Don's House in the Mountains in 2023--not to mention the short action novel I published in 2023 as well, Bainbridge. 

Generally my approach is the rough draft I write now I plan to publish three years later. Chad in Accounting doesn't fit that cadence, because I started it in the late 2000s and unfortunately let it sit dormant in the mid-2010s before I picked it back up; but A Girl and a Gun was written in 2018 and published in 2021; Holtman Arms was written in 2019 and published in 2022; and Don's House in the Mountains was written during the month of April of 2020, as we were in the midst of our pandemic lockdown. I gave myself a challenge to see if I could do 4000 words a day, so at the end of April I'd have a 120,000-word novel. I managed to meet the challenge, but wasn't finished with it at the end of the month--it ended up being over 150,000 words.

I still have those periods though where I don't feel like getting on the computer to work on my writing, and I'll go on social media to see what topic's trending, only to find a friend is posting about their new album, or book, or even movie they made, and it inspires me to minimize the window and open up Word again to get another 4000 words in, or proofread another chapter.